Category Archives: podcast

I wrote a book about governance: ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’

Posted on May 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

When an intranet loses its usefulness over time, and people become disengaged and end up working around it rather than through it, I often find that the strategy and governance have been neglected.

Even a strong and appropriate strategy will founder if the governance isn’t in place to execute it.

I see governance as the foundation of a great intranet, and by ‘great’ I mean an intranet that is useful, useable, and supports the organisation’s goals and people’s needs.

I often blog about intranet governance, but my brand new book offers a lot more than I could ever drip-feed via short posts. Writing a book has helped crystallise my thinking around governance, and delve deep into my past experience as an intranet manager, and as a consultant.

Take a look at my book now – it’s called ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’ and I mean for it to be relevant to intranets, collaboration, digital workplace and mobile workspace governance, while focussing on intranets.

I’m so pleased to have it published through Intranätverk, it’s been great to work with Kristian Norling and his team. Seeing the final book on my tablet has made the months of writing all worth the effort. I’m thrilled to be able to offer you my experience, guidance, and tips and hope you’ll consider my book a toolkit to better governance and a better intranet.

Please take a look at what the book offers you and your organisation – this is a ‘business book’ that should help organisations of every size, but I also hope it’s of interest to individual practitioners and ‘lone intranet managers’. I think this book can support you.

* Digital success or digital disaster? – Book available now.

* Follow me on – let me know what you think!

I agree the digital revolution is cultural, not technological, and….

Posted on April 22, 2015 | Leave a comment

In Gerry McGovern’s latest post he says ‘Digital transformation is cultural transformation first and foremost. Some time ago, I dealt with an organization that had just installed collaborative software. The problem was that the employees saw no benefit in collaborating. Surprise, surprise, collaboration didn’t happen. Collaboration, first and foremost, is a cultural thing, not a technological thing.’

While I agree with Gerry as far as he goes, I also believe the type of governance deployed for collaborative content can be a major barrier to people adopting these tools. Too often the governance used for accredited content e.g. policies and news articles, that are official and factual is also tried (and fails) for collaborative content.

A more ‘light touch’ form of governance is needed to remove the barriers that prevent people wanting to share their ideas or offer suggestions that may help someone with a work problem. Here are some examples of what I mean:

Posting on a blog or contributing to a discussion group should not need you to ask for permission before you start. It should be ‘on demand’ so there is no delay between when someone needs to use a collaboration tool and being able to. Often the need is urgent and passes quickly so any barrier preventing its use could mean the content is lost forever.
You should not need formal training before you use the collaboration tool. A) the tool should be so easy to use it isn’t needed and B) understanding how to comply with the publishing standards such as ownership and content review dates shouldn’t be required.
Usability and design shouldn’t be something you need to bother with. The important thing is your content. Make sure the template you use has the right functionality that people can just start using and understand easily.
Adapt and embed as many of your publishing standards that are relevant to collaboration into the templates e.g. navigation menus, field for contributor to enter their personal details.

Taking this approach shows how the culture has changed from a ‘command and control’ view of governance many years ago for a limited amount of corporate content. Now, many people can use a wide range of collaboration tools to publish their views and opinions and be comfortable with the experience and knowledge that the content is managed appropriately.

The governance adopted fits the cultural revolution and helps, not hinders, it. Long may that continue!

Strengthen employee engagement while working remotely

Posted on January 13, 2014 | 2 comments

Happy New Year to you! I hope you had a relaxing break and have recharged your batteries for 2014.

I was recently asked by Simply Communicate to follow up my 2014 predictions with one for internal communications. Here it is:

Organisations increasingly face the challenge of how to strengthen employee engagement while their workforce increasingly work from remote locations or while mobile. There is a great opportunity for internal communications to take a leading role with developing a plan that addresses these challenges with greater use of communications channels.

What is different now from previous years is the range of tools and know-how which can be used to successfully have engaged and mobile employees. The key to this will be the rich experience employees will have online as they are able to read communications when they need to, where they need to, and be able to share, feedback, rate the value of the messages with other people who share a similar interest.

An example of this could be combining collaboration tools with traditional online communication channels will help provide that rich experience so a key company announcement video, CEO blog post and detailed background information available is strengthened by a discussion forum managed by internal comms to continue the conversation with quick polls on the awareness and understanding of key messages.

It is how it is implemented and how it is managed within a wider governance framework will help decide how successful it will be. Good luck with whatever you do in 2014!

Read about more 2014 internal communication predictions from simple communicate.

2 Comments

Posted in blog, collaboration, communication, community, engagement, mobile, podcast, social media, value, wiki

Tagged blog, collaboration, communication, engagement, mobile, social media, value, wiki

8 ways that SharePoint can help internal communications

Posted on July 9, 2012 | 6 comments

I have covered in previous posts how internal communications can improve with collaboration tools. I also believe SharePoint can help organisations’ intranets if applied well. This post covers 8 ways that SharePoint can help internal communications.

I’m not saying that SharePoint is the only way to improve internal comms or intranets generally. There are other technologies that can do this as well or better. It is how you use the technology that is critical to it being a success.

These 8 ways can help SharePoint make a difference to internal communications by offering more agile and tailored solutions to meet the organisation’s needs:

Polls: you can use polls to ask for feedback on a subject with a menu of answers for people to choose from.
News: you can tailor a section of a page to show as many stories as you want. You can give people the choice to see extra news and mandate how many news stories they must see and how many are optional.
News stories: people can read these and show how they feel by using the SharePoint features to like and rate the stories.
Share news stories: people can also share a story with people who will be interested. This is usually by email like with internet sites.
Tag news stories: people can also tag a story with words or phrases that group it with other information or news they can find easily in future. Tags can also be shared with other people and their tags can create a folksonomy.
Discussion forums: people are able to extend their feedback on the news story by discussing it further with other people. Internal communicators can also join the discussion and help explain any points that are unclear to people.
Blogs: people (including internal communicators) can give a personal view on a news story. Again it extends the original message if someone feels strongly about or offers an opinion to challenge another view. This can help tease out small issues that can be quickly resolved before they can become major issues later that are more complex and harder to sort out.
Podcasts: internal communicators can show and tell how to do something to help illustrate a message better than using words. This is different from high quality corporate videos. The quality may be lower but much cheaper and normally accepted by people. It is the informal, personal, style that can make a positive difference to people’s perceptions.

The real benefits with SharePoint are when you use it on a major scale. If you create the content to be communicated once, then be able to re-use it across many channels, you can focus on quality of the message. You can communicate it as a news article, mobile text, video/podcast, etc. and get feedback from discussion forums, polls, rating, comments, shares and likes to it.

6 Comments

Posted in best practice, collaboration, communication, engagement, intranet, podcast, , SharePoint 2010, wiki

Tagged blog, collaboration, communication, engagement, intranet, sharepoint 2010, social media, wiki

Can collaboration tools improve internal communications?

Posted on April 3, 2012 | 11 comments

Intranets have developed over recent years from mainly being a channel for a few people to publish news to becoming places where any employee can collaborate and share knowledge with other employees. I find it ironic that it is internal communications who are hesitant, even resistant, to embrace these changes. Ironic because many intranet teams are located within internal communications. Doubly ironic as it is normally intranet teams who are involved with how collaboration tools are used.

Instead of embracing this chance to engage with employees using these new tools and integrate them into an enhanced communications framework, internal communications reaction is more often a knee-jerk one that results in more and more ‘official’ news to try to drown out other voices.

I think that’s very sad when it happens. It’s a bit like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. It has to face reality at some stage. The later internal comms leave it, the bigger the challenge it faces to use these tools to the overall benefit of the organisation, employees and internal communications.

Over the next few posts I want to cover how tools like blogs, video, rating and RSS can be used more effectively. I will also show how I can help you if you need more information and support.

Is this scenario something you are familiar with in your own organisation?

11 Comments

Posted in blog, collaboration, communication, engagement, intranet, podcast, , social media, wiki

Tagged blog, collaboration, communication, engagement, intranet, , social media, wiki

What is a digital workplace?

Posted on March 5, 2012 | 30 comments

Last week at the IntraTeam event in Copenhagen (Twitter ) there were many discussions about the digital workplace and what exactly is a digital workplace.

I thought it would be good to start a debate on what we mean when we say the digital workplace. Many intranet professionals want to find out more about the digital workplace. Here is my view for you to consider and comment upon.

What exactly is a digital workplace?

I define the digital workplace as “Work is what you do, not where you go to.”

In a digital workplace you are able to:

Work in any location. This may be at home, in your own or anyone else’s office, on the train, or ideally anywhere that suits you at the time you need to.
Do your work. This may making a room booking, checking a person’s contacts details, searching for information you need, or reading the latest news.
Use any device. This maybe your laptop, a shared PC, a smartphone (iPhone), or tablet (iPad).
Share information. This means being able to use collaboration tools to help other people.
Search across all places where information is and you have permission to use.

What is the difference between a digital workplace and an intranet?

An intranet has a more limited role. An intranet typically has corporate news and documents e.g. policies. Publishing will probably use content and document management systems. A digital workplace will also have:

Collaboration tools e.g. blogs, wikis, podcasts
Micro blogging tools e.g. Yammer, Twitter
Knowledge sharing/building e.g. team wikis and share workspaces
Applications/tools e.g. HR tools, online training, sales performance
Processes e.g. approving decisions, compliance checks

It will help me and other intranet professionals if you can comment to agree, disagree, amend, etc, to create a shared understanding on the digital workplace. Thanks in advance.

30 Comments

Posted in application, blog, collaboration, content management, digital workplace, intranet, mobile, news, podcast, , wiki

Tagged applications, blog, collaboration, digital workplace, intranet, , social media, wiki

Increase intranet value by adopting social media

Posted on November 25, 2010 | 1 comment

I’m speaking next Monday about how BT has increased the value of its intranet by adopting social media tools to help improve collaborating by people solving business problems.

The conference is called ‘Employee Portal Masters Evolution’. I’m really looking forward to hearing from some great intranet speakers about:

strategic business alignment & integration of social media
evolution of intranets and employee portals into digital workplaces
intranet lifecycle management
benchmarking and KPIs of portals for a maximum on ROI

If you can’t join me, you can see if you are interested.

1 Comment

Posted in best practice, blog, governance, intranet, podcast, social media, value, wiki

Tagged best practice, blog, bt intranet, governance, social media, standards, value, wiki

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I agree the digital revolution is cultural, not technological, and….

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